The Badness Of Death

Yale University has put many of its philosophy courses on YouTube and iTunes for free. Professor Shelly Kagan's course on death is one of the really interesting ones. Kagan is a sort of American Bernard Williams although I don't think Professor Williams would ever have sat cross legged on his desk wearing Converses (he certainly didn't in my tutorials). In the lecture below Kagan discusses Tolstoy's classic story The Death of Ivan Ilyich and he begins to unpack the badness of death. Yes we know it's bad but how bad and why is it bad...